Google Updates Places Time to Live for Dashboard Data

The last 3 or 4 months in Places havebeenquite erratic. Some data that had been posting from Places in moments had gone to weeks. It seemed that things like descriptions could take 6 to 7 weeks. Google has just announced a new speedier update cycle of “usually a few days” for most data and “about a week” for photos in this forum post. It will still take a number of weeks to resolve dupes and merges. Here is the full body of the post:

Hey all,

There have been a lot of questions in the forum lately about verifying new listings and making updates to existing ones, and we wanted to clear up some of that confusion. We’ve been doing some work on our backend, cleaning up the pipes in order to make more improvements to Google Places over time. Here are the typical turnaround times for updates you make in your Google Places account.

–> This includes newly verified bulk uploads (and any attributes, as noted below)

• Business titles

• Addresses

• Phone numbers

• Website URLs

• Pin marker moves

• Descriptions

• Hours

• Categories

What will update in about a week:

• Photos

• Videos

What will typically take several weeks to resolve:

• Merged listings

• Duplicate listings

The Post to your Place page feature (http://goo.gl/f8bCp) should update to your listing near instantly, but we’re experiencing some technical issues with that right now. Expect a fix soon.

Also, please note that reviews are not affected by these new changes. If you’re experiencing technical issues with the reviews on your listing, please see this Help Center article for more information: http://goo.gl/emQsE

Thanks,

Vanessa

Several notes.

While waiting for your listing to go live after a claim it will likely show the “We do not currently support this location” message for the duration of the waiting period. During this “waiting period” the standard “tickle your Places record with an edit” fix for this problem will have no affect. Going forward it is not clear if the fix will still be needed or not on records that go south after verification with the error.

Some updates seem to take a few days longer than a “few” with some taking 6 to 7 days but it seems that has been improving over the past week.

Note that Vanessa said: We’ve been doing some work on our backend, cleaning up the pipes in order to make more improvements to Google Places over time. Hopefully we will continue to see improvements in a range of the problem areas and Places bugs of the past.

Let me know how long your updates are taking!

Please consider leaving a comment as your input will help me (& everyone else) better understand and learn about local.

Google Updates Places Time to Live for Dashboard Data
by Mike Blumenthal

15 thoughts on “Google Updates Places Time to Live for Dashboard Data”

Great! Just added a post and special offers for a client and they still aren’t showing yet. It costs the biz owner because the offers are based on a weekly schedule. Hope Google Places will get everything streamlined soon. Glad Vanessa gave an update! And thanks for posting this.

Mike~ Thanks SO MUCH for this post!!! We’ve encountered these delays and the “we do not support this location” issue for the past couple weeks – and it wasn’t clear if the issue was with Places, or the account, or what. Now we can chill out and wait for the updates.

We’re at the 6 day mark for a couple clients “waiting period”. I’ll report back next week with how many days it actually took.

I hope they are truly cleaning the pipes and fixing bugs and not preparing for a roll-out of some new initiative/product/re-brand.

While this update is/will be significant and could very well contribute to more stability of the listings, fewer lost reviews and much quicker updates, it will likely ALSO bring new capabilities (and their own bugs).

This has been a real nightmare, lots of my clients are having major
issues. The “Google Headline” is definitely NOT updating, not even after a full day. We have been waiting for pictures for several weeks.

Not only is it taking long for any updates to be….updated, if you work within Google places as much as me, you’ll notice that there are a ton of new listings that have popped up. Well, not new, but actually old.

In my industry (bail bonds) there are a lot of companies that have 100’s of fake listings. Google and Map Maker reviewers over time delete these listings, then the bad companies repost new fake ones and so on.

What I’ve seen lately are some of the old (deleted) fake listings popping up. It seems like Google is resubmitting listings to the public to see what kind of feedback it will get.

imho, this is what Google has done from the beginning, throw all these listings out there, and see which one’s stick.

Meanwhile my listing for a company that has been at this very address since 1948 keeps getting merged, hijacked, et al and the “updates” that I provide are now taking much longer.

One of the reasons for this dilemma is that the DBA for the company has geo-modifiers and the keyword in it. Van Nuys Bail Bonds. There are 30 or so other companies that are gaming for the same Google 7 box (3 box, one box, never know these days) and they plug all their keywords+geo-modifiers in there and voila! The merging goes on…..We’ve been fighting this merging/hijacking war for almost 2 years.

The only technique that has gotten a timely (shortest was one day) response was to start running adexpress on the Google Places listing. That way if/when it get’s merged or screwed up, we call adwords and speak with an adexpress person and complain about how we can no longer spend money on this listing because of the major problems.

Oh well, I guess it keeps me employed….any insight from any of you is greatly appreciated.

It seems as though supportive citations and local listing optimization helps new listings fly through the radar and I have found the best way to mess it up is to have multiple location reviews for multiple locations from the same IP account. Silly cheaters only suffer when they get caught. Google is getting smarter. I am having so much fun training this new client! 😉

It appears that the duplicates are an artifact of the “some work on our backend, cleaning up the pipes in order to make more improvements to Google Places over time”. It appears to have resurfaced old listings for some reason.

I would be on the look out for then and use the Report a Problem to get them cleaned up. I think once they are gone they will stay gone and the index will be more accurate and robust going forward.

The time frame for post cards has been all over the map (pardon the pun) for me. One client it takes 2 weeks and another it takes 4 all in the same city. Hopefully they will address this soon. Where possible I use the phone verification.

Well, the “time to update” for us was 7-8 days and now everything is fine. In once case however – the listing was “rejected” and is now “pending”. There is nothing out of the guidelines ~ so that’s a bit odd.

As for the Post Card time frames, they’ve always been erratic but has anyone else noticed a steep decline in performance at the good ole USPS? Yikes!

Update….I just captured a client Place Page, and it worked within 5 minutes, including the google headline. I am however still waiting for other client pages to optimize with pictures etc. from several weeks ago. Any suggestions on those pages that still haven’t shown up with new pictures and info? Thanks…Bruno